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User profile for user: mrbofus
mrbofus Author
User level: Level 2
257 points

Spotlight - index network drives / folders?

I'm not sure if I'm missing something completely obvious, but is there a way to get Spotlight to index a network drive/share/folder?

Thanks in advance!

Mac OS X (10.5.3)

Posted on Jun 25, 2008 3:44 PM

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User profile for user: glsmith
glsmith
User level: Level 3
875 points

Posted on Jun 28, 2008 12:12 AM

You can, but if the device is not another 10.5 Mac, it's kind of messy. Apple was careful to qualify in the "300+ new features" marketing that you can search any "shared Mac" on your network with Spotlight ( http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html#spotlight), not any "shared disk".

Anyway, you can force Spotlight to index any mounted disk by using the mdutil utility from the command line. Something like this:

sudo mdutil -i on /Volume/network_volume

There might be some weirdness with unmounting and remounting the network drive, wrt how up to date the index is kept. You'll have to play around with this. Also, the Spotlight GUI is notoriously bad at not providing complete search results. In your testing, I'd recommend using the command line utility "mdfind", which doesn't seem to have the same problems as the GUI.

Note that you can also search any network drive via the Finder, however that does not utilize any index -- the search is basically just doing a complete directory tree walk...
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User profile for user: glsmith
glsmith
User level: Level 3
875 points

Jun 28, 2008 12:12 AM in response to mrbofus

You can, but if the device is not another 10.5 Mac, it's kind of messy. Apple was careful to qualify in the "300+ new features" marketing that you can search any "shared Mac" on your network with Spotlight ( http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html#spotlight), not any "shared disk".

Anyway, you can force Spotlight to index any mounted disk by using the mdutil utility from the command line. Something like this:

sudo mdutil -i on /Volume/network_volume

There might be some weirdness with unmounting and remounting the network drive, wrt how up to date the index is kept. You'll have to play around with this. Also, the Spotlight GUI is notoriously bad at not providing complete search results. In your testing, I'd recommend using the command line utility "mdfind", which doesn't seem to have the same problems as the GUI.

Note that you can also search any network drive via the Finder, however that does not utilize any index -- the search is basically just doing a complete directory tree walk...
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User profile for user: baseliner
baseliner
User level: Level 1
0 points

Dec 29, 2008 7:56 PM in response to baltwo

That's not the problem. I deleted the index created by the Tiger machine but even after that when I enable indexing on the Leopard machine, Spotlight doesn't start pulsating, no md* process kicks off.. I emailed Apple about this and apparently this feature has been intentionally disabled in Leopard. Here's the reply from Apple (this really ***** btw since I have a lot of OCR'd files that I need to search thru for my research work):

"We intentionally turned this off for Leopard 'cause it was a problem that lots of people would enable indexing on public AFP volumes and swamp the servers.

On Leopard we only allow local indexing of network locations via Network Homes and more recently (SL) PodCast Producer has some special SPI.

Remote indexing via Server Side Search is also a Leopard feature.

The AFP server needs to be running Leopard for indexing to occur. Leopard supports server-side indexing."
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User profile for user: Tom in London
Tom in London
User level: Level 4
1,632 points

Dec 29, 2008 8:18 PM in response to baseliner

The problem is the index itself. Apple, in its wisdom, has decided that instead of actually searching on drives for what is really there, Spotlight will create an index and search the index.

Don't ask me why.

Ever since Apple did that, these forums have been filled with people who can't find their stuff, and with arcane, time-consuming suggestions for tweaking Spotlight to try and make it work.

There's a better way.

Don't use Spotlight, just use a much simpler tool, such as FindFile or EasyFind. Either of these two freeware applications will search your actual drives, and will search everywhere - not in an index.

I hope some of you may find this helps to solve your problems.

FindFile is here: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/10906315

EasyFind is here: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/8707
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User profile for user: Colin Cohen
Colin Cohen
User level: Level 1
58 points

Jan 1, 2009 7:19 AM in response to Tom in London

I guess I have a variant on this problem - the issues seems to be Spotlight/FindFile, rather than TimeMachine as I originally thought.

If I search for any item that happens to be in a folder on the Desktop, or on the DT itself, S and FF do not find the TM copy - which made me think there was a problem with TM. Normally any item I look for will show up twice - on my boot vol and the TM b/u.

Obviously if there was nothing on the DT it would be no problem, but it is disconcerting to be told that current work is not backed up - and each time I have to enter TM to be sure I really have a copy.

Is there a fix?

I get no error messages.
Cheers, Colin
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Spotlight - index network drives / folders?

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